Academic Secret

There's a good article in insidehighered.com today on a law suit alleging that a university didn't comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act because a professor wouldn't provide accommodations for a student with a disability. I've been thinking of posting about my own situation for a while now; I would love to hear your reactions.
I've got serious problems with depression. I've been on medications and in treatment for it for 7 years now. Because of family history, and how depression progresses as a disease, it's very likely that I will have episodes of depression periodically for the rest of my life. This would be true whether or not I was in academia.
While I was still taking courses, I had an extremely hard time getting my big papers done by the deadlines at the end of each quarter. The quarter system is brutal to everyone, but I would get paralyzed by anxiety sometime around the 9th week, and not be able to make progress on the big papers. Small papers or short assignments, no problem. But research papers were problematic for me. I would do WAY too much reading of the relevant (and irrelevant literature), outline a paper that was 5 times too long, and then panic because there was no way that I could finish the project I had started. Classic perfectionist, overachiever problems. But because of the depression this became a life-threatening situation when anxiety and panic led to suicidal thoughts and withdrawal. Each quarter I would sink into despair, and become totally incapacitated. I would end up sending overly apologetic emails to professors saying that I couldn't complete their papers, and could I please have an extension or an incomplete. Eventually, I learned to email the professors at the beginning or middle of the quarter and give them a heads-up that this was likely to happen, and try to negotiate something in advance. I would tell them I'm registered with the Disability Center, and have documentation of my problems.
I've received a wide variety of responses from professors. A few have been supportive and nonjudgmental. Many say that they don't ever give extensions or incompletes, as a matter of fairness to other students. Others say they won't give it to me for my own good, because they've seen too many grad students' careers get sidetracked by an incomplete. I feel like shaking these professors and telling them the thoughts that go through my head every time I think about their paper: literally, whenever the thought of the class or paper would come into my head, I would think "I want to kill myself" or "I want to die". If they knew that, would they still act is if I was just lazy and unmotivated? Do they think that I'm not trying?
I sometimes think that I get weird reactions from professors because up until that point in the quarter I was usually a star student in the course, achieving well beyond expectations*. That's one of the reasons I stay in academia, even though I have mental health problems. I am actually very talented at what I do, when I'm able to get it done. It's just that I can't get it done on other peoples' schedules some of the time.
I know that academia is chock full of people with depression, especially during the phd years. So why aren't there better systems in place to deal with students like me? How come the professors are allowed to unilaterally decide that I don't need an accommodation? But also, should I really be trying to be an academic if I've got so much anxiety around deadlines? Furthermore, what does "fairness" mean when some of us are fighting mental and physical illnesses (or both at the same time) just to get to the starting line? If the battle is that steeply uphill, should we even be fighting it?

* I don't mean to be egotistical, but this is what they tell me.

Kodachrome just posted two copies of a really interesting post. Being an administrator on the side of good, I deleted one. But then someone deleted the other. (Kodachrome? Plaid?) I hope it's not gone--I was trying to post a comment on it and then Blogger told me I couldn't because the post didn't exist.

As a graduate student without a trust fund or other outside income, I find myself having frequent money difficulties. I was telling my advisor about the latest troubles, and she said that when she was a grad student and broke, she used the pain to channel her energies into finishing her degree. The idea of finishing and not being broke anymore kept her motivated.
This is ironic, I think, because I could make more money doing almost any other kind of job that requires my current qualifications than I could make being an assistant professor. Just saying.

End of summer sees several big social science association meetings (e.g. management, political science, sociology) not to mention assorted other professional get-togethers so I can't possibly be the only one starting to get anxious about meeting deadlines. Of course, giving a presentation is one thing, writing a paper is another. Unfortunately, some of my upcoming obligations require both.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to best approach a quick and dirty paper draft. For some of the presentations I will be giving, I'm also required to disseminate a paper. And since there are discussants, it looks like someone may actually read said paper.

I do have an outline, sort of. In grad school I learned the value of outlines, wow, they can be really helpful. So that is more or less done, including the major questions of the paper (while that should be an obvious given, don't tell me you have not read papers that go on for 30 pages and never state a clear research question so I felt this point was worth noting explicitly). So anyway, I have an outline and I have a question. I am also familiar enough with related literature that that part should be okay. What I don't have is all of the analyses, which then also means that I don't have all (any?) of the findings ready either.

My current strategy is as follows. Start working on the presentation slides. That way I will get a better sense for which analyses are most important and need to be performed immediately. But I will still have to write something that's in paper form. (Note to people from various fields in the audience: social science papers are usually at least 20 pages if not 30 or more so we're not just talking a short piece here.) So how do I get the actual paper ready? Needless to say, I have just about no time to work on any of this due to too many other obligations that are, of course, just as pressing.

PS. No need to point out that instead of writing this post I could've probably made some advances in the paper. I know that. But that didn't stop me. And thus my need for advice.

I share a house with an academic. We share some publications, and a bed, and an office, and some other things, and that's tough enough. I think the hardest thing to share is the limelight, especially when I feel like I'm in the shadows. I've been sharing things with him for a while, though, so I've grown accustomed to how it feels and how to cope with it.

Now I might have to share again.

My department is hiring in specific areas for next year. One happens to be an area where an old friend from undergraduate school has excelled. She is my friend. I should be excited that she's a front-runner for the position. I should be thrilled that someone who knows me so well might move here, to the middle of nowhere. I should be excited for her, that she's got the potential for getting a great job. I should be thrilled we're hiring another woman. I should feel like sharing.

I don't. I feel like the kid who got a new bike for their birthday and who doesn't want to let anyone else ride it. I'm not ready to share what I have.

Am I insane, or just insecure? Is this how every assistant professor feels when they're no longer the newest assistant, or is this because of our friendship? Maybe I'm just more competitive than I'd like to admit.

This post was sparked by thistle's comment on Transitions, although I want to make clear that I know this isn't what she was saying; it's just a hot button for me.

I hate it when people act like younger graduate students are just here because we couldn't think of anything else to do with ourselves. I've known that I wanted to go to graduate school since I was in junior high--I changed my mind about for what a few times, but the basic idea that I would pursue a PhD was pretty much a constant. I'm a smart person. I grew up among academics and it's a life with which I am comfortable; it's the kind of life I want to have. I certainly didn't want to take time off just for the sake of taking time off, especially when I was a little afraid of losing my academic rhythm. There was like one summer in my entire college career that I didn't take classes, and it left me feeling at loose ends.

But there are plenty of people who don't take me seriously because I'm younger. There are also people who actively resent me for it, and take varying degrees of pains to hide that. For some of them, that degree is none, like the woman who told me that younger graduate students never really know what they want to do with their lives and will just wander off into the sunset after squandering a few years of funding that should have gone to older, more mature and deserving graduate students.

The resentment seems to be expressed more freely by older female graduate students; I'm pretty sure that there is a component of general resentment of younger women included here. I think older male graduate students (and faculty) are more likely just to not take me seriously, and sometimes it's hard to tease out whether that's because I'm young or because I'm female. I have definitely had moments in professional seminars when an older, male person has restated something that I just said a minute ago and gotten a much more enthusiastic reception from the group at large.

At least when I finish my PhD people will be less likely to assume that I went to grad school to kill time. I hope.

I remember learning years ago that there are two types of people - those who hate graduate school and can't wait to get out, and those who love graduate school and wish they never had to leave. It's only now, having moved 2000 miles for my first job, that I realize I might be one of the latter.

I feel like that curmudgeony old woman who tells those younger than her to appreciate their good looks and nice figures because one day they'll disappear (oh, wait... I am that woman). Seriously, though, for those of you out there, struggling with the gruel of grad school, stop and smell the roses. You could actually wake up one day and realize that these were some of the best years of your life.

I started grad school with 11 other souls who I thought were in the exact same position as me. I am starting my job with one other person, and I know enough to know that he's in a much better position than I am. My job during grad school was to learn as much as I could - to spend time reading, thinking, conversing. My job now is to produce as much as possible. I used to spend Friday nights at happy hour. Now I spend Friday nights working. I used to take leisurely lunches. Now I eat yesterday's leftovers, as fast as I can. In grad school I could walk into faculty members' offices and talk to them about ideas, ask them questions, and share good news with them. Now I only talk business.

Yeah, I know that parts of grad school suck too. I mean, I am pretty excited about seeing that first assistant professor paycheck and it's cool that all my printing and mailing is free and I finally get to send someone else to the library to photocopy.

I just wanted to offer a word of warning. Of course I'm aware that, like my warnings for the thin young women who complain that they're fat, this cautionary tale might fall on deaf ears. Just remember, though, when you're making your own difficult transition, that someone did tell you that you might actually miss graduate school.

A brief note regarding picture secrets. I post one per day. (Please visit on weekends as well, I try to post on weekends, too.) Thanks to your enthusiastic graphical production, I have a few awaiting publication now. I post them in order of arrival. The only exception is that if I get several from the same email account, I may mix in some others. This is all in the interest of full disclosure, not that that would be of particular concern around here.

When possible, please send pictures in jpg format. I've had to edit some of the others to make them work here. Of course, if that's the only way you can do it then send it in as such, I'll figure it out.

Important: don't let the above comment about the picture queue discourage you from sending in secrets. There is plenty of room for more!

I'm working on part of the lit review for my dissertation proposal, and I'm having problems bounding the universe of Things I Think I Should Have Read Before I Can Write My Proposal. When I do get my act together and read something on my list of things I absolutely have to read before I can talk sensibly about the field, I find at least 10 other things in the references list that I should also read before I can talk sensibly about the field, and so forth. Exponential growth.
You know those beer ads that said 'know when to say when'? They should have a class in grad school on this concept wrt lit reviews.
Week 1: Know when to say when
Week 2: Know when to hold, know when to fold 'em.
Week 3: Just Say No (to review articles)
Week 4: This is your brain on EndNote

Ok, that's all I can think of for now - the rest is going to have to be independent work and student presentations.

But seriously, all you people who already have PhDs, where do you draw the line? How do you keep yourself from printing out bajillions of articles you won't ever have time to read? There's so much out there, how do you decide that anything isn't relevant?

Sometimes when I say, "What if I fuck this up?" it's not because I want people to tell me that I'm not going to fuck it up. I'd rather they just told me that they'll still like me anyway.

Also, my computer just ate an hour's worth of work and I had a little temper tantrum here in my office. Hitting my desk. Outraged squeaking. Moaning, "No! NO!" over and over again.

Now I am redoing it all. What can you do? You can only sit there squeaking and considering a crying jag for so long, that's for sure, and I personally do not want to have any crying jags on campus. There's one women's bathroom in this building in particular where I swear I hear someone having an emotional breakdown in the next stall, like, once a week. I don't want to be that person, although at this time of day it's mostly just a challenge to find a bathroom that the janitorial staff isn't working on.

I want ice cream.

I thought I'd do something really fitting for my debut post over here at a.secret -- what happened to my motivation?

I'm motivated to do all sorts of things (read blogs, post on blogs, sleep, read trashy novels, clean my closet), but not work. I don't know where my motivation went -- it was here a moment ago. Okay, that's probably not quite true, but it was here a few weeks ago. Now it's MIA. And it's not like this is just a phase -- it happens all the time.

I find that, an astounding amount of time, I'm not motivated to do much of anything work related. If I have a looming (firm) deadline, I get stuff done. Otherwise, not so much. So, either I'm unbelievably lazy or ... okay, I am unbelievably lazy, but I think motivation is part of it. If I'm not feeling motivated to work, well, you can figure out the rest.

So, here's my inaugural secret: I spend most of my office time doing nothing that
looks like work.

Some people have asked to see a list of colors that have already been "taken" so they can come up with their own names. This is a bit hard to tell. What I can do here is post a list of users who have contributed to the site under color names so far.

Administrators:
Clear & Plaid

Other Contributors:
Atomic Tangerine
Cerise
Kodachrome
Navy Blue Blob
Orange Ina
Salmon Ella
Scarlet
Sienna
Thistle
Turquoise Stuff

We've had other people leave comments as well (or the same people using other names, I don't know, it's all so secret!), but they have not used colors, these tend to be commenters only. I have not listed those here.

There are lots of colors in the rainbow (and in a Crayola set) so don't be shy, there must be a color combo out there to represent you.

Less than a month into the life of this blog (and we hadn't even gone public yet), the various posts have received over 150 comments. Go colorful team, go!

Clear and I are enjoying people's colorful contributions and look forward to the secret conversations ahead. Feel free to spread the word about a.secret. Thanks for joining us!

Click on the image to see the details

Yes! That way people could see which discussions were still raging away from past posts. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't support a Recent Comments feature, and their purported "hack" for doing it doesn't really work either. Likewise, I would love it if we had categories/tags so that one could easily lookup all the posts from a particular one of our secret correspondents -- or view all of the Picture Secrets at once -- but Blogger doesn't support this either.

Blogger is owned by Google, and I'm used to Google producing great products, but apparently that memo didn't make it to the Blogger wing of the Googleplex. Neither Plaid nor I were great fans of Blogger when we decided it should be the home of a.secret, but we thought it would be easy for Correspondents to use and also allowed a relatively straightforward means of implementing our super-secret, patented protocol by which even we do not know who the different members of a.secret are.

A reader sends in a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (well, just one rectangle) about pursuing an academic career. It was created as a T-shirt design by a computer scientist. I'm going to link to where this came from (or really big version here) so we don't get into trouble about reproducing copyrighted material. (Uhm, which is not to discourage you from reworking images into picture secrets, of course!)

In the short history of a.secret, the following has already emerged as a main theme, it seems. But I'm going to post about it anyway. After all, I personally haven't yet. And I don't see any solutions in the other related posts so additional discussion seems warranted. (In fact, the inspiration for this post - other than desperation - came from Salmon Ella and thistle starting a fight over who gets to claim the resident slacker name. I figured I had to jump in.)

I finally got myself to start writing a to-do list this morning. It's enormously long. The list contains some items that were due a long time ago and many items that would be great to get done in the next few weeks, a month or two tops. Obviously some items are much quicker than others (e.g. the difference between booking some hotel rooms vs writing an academic paper). Nonetheless, the mere length of the list is keeping me away from getting anything done. (Hmm.. maybe I should've put "post to a.secret" on the list so I could cross off something today.)

So what to do? How to attack the list? A few items are related to must-meet deadlines (after all, I don't want to embark on a trip somewhere without having made lodging arrangements), but others are fairly flexible (and have been delayed for longer than I care to admit).

I have heard the advice, and it seems reasonable, that any item on a to-do list should be bounded enough that you can do it in one sitting so it is reasonable to expect to make some progress on it. Okay, fine, so I'll go back and divide the items about writing papers into many subitems. But that's only going to make the list longer, which is only going to paralyze me even more.

So what to do? How do I get anything done when there is so much to choose from?! Seriously, this is a major concern, and I'm sure not just for me. C'mon gang, help me out. Please. Pretty or ugly please, your pick.

It's that time of year again, when large parts of the campus of the elite research university at which I am a grad student have been turned over to summer camps. This week, according to the signs posted here, there, and everywhere, our campus is host to lacrosse camps, soccer camps, science camps, and baseball camps.
Every time I leave my building I run into groups of very young people being led around by slightly-less-young people with clipboards and a whistle around their necks.
Normally the campers are fairly benign. Sometimes I even feel nostalgic when I see a group playing capture-the-flag.
But last week, I was almost killed by a Frisbee that the youngsters were throwing around. And then on Saturday I had to wait ten minutes in line to pee in the locker room at the campus pool because pre-teen campers were too embarrassed to change into their swimsuits in front of other girls, and were instead taking up the toilet stalls changing in private. This gave me ample time to ponder the possibility that they were probably peeing in the pool when not using the toilets as changing rooms.
Call me a curmudgeon. I know the university wouldn't turn itself into kindercentral without good reason, presumably monetary. But I'm soooo over the squealing and yelling and pushing in line at the cafeteria. It almost makes me miss the undergrads.
Almost.

Not that Plaid's stopgap idea for the links section to just have the Wikipedia entries for "Academic" and "Secret" wasn't smashing, but I decided a more enduring solution would be for us to devote the linkspace in the sidebar to celebrating academic pseudonymous (or pseudopseudonymous, in some cases) blogs. Let me know via the comments if you have any suggestions.

Thanks for all the fan mail you've sent us! (Feel free to keep it up.:) We may not be able to respond to messages individually, but we do appreciate them. Of course, what we appreciate most is if you keep on coming back and contributing to academicsecret.

Colorful whisperers unite!

I'm stuck. I have an undergraduate research assistant who seems like a very nice and conscientious person (that is, she seems to take the job seriously) working for me this summer, but she is unbelievably slow. I seriously cannot imagine how she can be as slow as she is with the work she is doing.

Sure, my expectations may be off. But I am comparing her productivity to that of RAs before her doing very similar work. And she is much much slower. So what to do? I don't want to go into attack mode. But this is not reasonable. I think she is interested in graduate school, and she won't cut it with this level of productivity. She's shy and reserved so I am additionally concerned that critical feedback will make her even more timid. I also don't want the quality of her work to go down just because I am asking her to be more efficient.

Do I just let it be and accept the fact that this was not a good investment? I think she will be able to finish what is absolutely crucial to get done by the end of the summer. But I had hoped for much more. It's just painful to watch how someone can be this slow.

Any suggestions on how to deal with a situation like this?

Click image for more legible version.

As per the note on the sidebar of this blog, in addition to having our members post elaborate (or not) secrets, we are also exploring graphical representations of academic secrets. So if you are not a member (or even if you are), we invite you to send in a secret in graphical representation. We got the idea from the site Post Secret.

Note that these short secrets have to be _graphical_ representations. We have now received a few submissions, but they are all just simple text. That won't do. Please resend them in graphical form for consideration. Also, we reserve the right not to post a graphical secret if we deem it inappropriate. We reserve the right to determine what we consider inappropriate.

As clarification I wanted to mention - in response to an email we received recently - that we were not striving to be an academic Post Secret site. That component is just something we added, because it has the potential to be interesting in addition to the core mission of the site: to allow academics (members and visitors alike) to discuss whatever is on their mind.

I was watching a nature show on polar bears yesterday, and it got really intense*. Momma polar bear and her two cubs were being chased across an immense wasteland of ice by a menacing male polar bear. One of the cubs couldn't keep up anymore, and fell exhausted down on the snow. Momma polar bear - let's call her Sophie - had to decide whether to stop and protect the downed cub or keep trying to escape with the heartier cub who was still on its feet. Sophie ended up running away with the cub that could still keep up. I was crying freely when the male polar bear started ripping into the first cub, and the blood got all over the snow.

Deciding that this wasn't exactly the relaxing TV fix I was looking for, I flipped to a different channel. When I saw what was on, I thought to myself 'ah, thank goodness. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,' and cheered up immediately. What kind of nutcase am I that the death of a polar bear cub totally undid me, but a show about the rape and murder of children seemed like a happy, lighthearted diversion?


*even more intense than the computer-generated polar bear tragedy in Inconvenient Truth.

Career considerations may not be the only ones for blogging under a pseudonym. One's private life may benefit from being discrete as well.

Consider the following. You are someone who blogs every little detail of your life publicly. These details include not only your favorite local ice cream hang-out spot and sushi bar, but also when your ex broke up with you, why, how it made you feel, what you think about the ex now, etc. Then one day you meet a romantic interest. Said romantic interest knows about your blog. Don't you think s/he may be just a little bit put off by the idea that as soon as s/he enters into a conversation with you (never mind whatever else may follow) her/his life will be subject to complete public scrutiny as well? Talk about a turn-off. Well, I guess that depends on your preferences. But I could see it as a big alarm flashing for plenty o' people.

In my first foray into finding and pasting JavaScript into an HTML document myself, we now have randomized slogans. Granted, they are not all exactly clever. They will elaborate and improve if this keeps going.

Afterward, I thought that instead of slogans, we might have used the space to post things that looked like juicy secrets that could come spilling forth on this blog at any moment. Things like, "Sometimes I 'lose' Republican students' assignments out of spite" or "I've shown 41 films already this semester" or "I'm this close to seducing my Dean" or "The middle half of my dissertation was plagiarized from Harlequin novels... and no one noticed!"

The more I think about the possibilities: should we have slogans in the sidebar, or fake secrets?

Let me know if you have any other comments on the template. I'm still not sure what I think of our main text font (Optima).

As if grad school weren't stressful enough, I have to deal with expectations from certain significant others that I am going to nobly self-sacrifice for the benefit of people who should not be here in the first place--that I am going to build a travois of intellectual assistance and drag the dead weight of certain fellow students across the academic wilderness with me, sharing my pemmican and everything.

Aside from the fact that this seems patently ridiculous to ask of anyone, it seems particularly ridiculous to expect me to do it. I don't think I ever gave the impression of being nice, let alone some kind of academic martyr. I don't even have time to clean my own bathroom, and it's not like anyone would do anything for me if I took on this task.

This thankless task, I might add, because as far as I can tell this person cannot tell that I am exponentially smarter and more with-it than they will ever be, and is in fact more likely to stare at my chest than listen to me explain concepts.

And yet, I find myself tendering all kinds of explanations instead of more honestly saying, "It is not my responsibility to keep this person from flunking out of school." I kind of feel like I shouldn't have to; this should be obvious to everyone concerned. But apparently it isn't.

I have plenty of pet peeves about academics, here is one. If you are going to send a response to a query on a mailing list, how about taking the trouble to make it helpful? People will send notes that resemble thinking out loud more than actual advice. “I think I saw something along those lines in Journal X in year Y, or maybe it was Journal Z in another year, you could try searching those.” How is that helpful? Or, “Try Web site xyz.com (or maybe it was wxyz.com)”. Before sending a note to hundreds (if not thousands) of people, why not actually go and check whether it was xyz or wxyz? I find such behavior obnoxious. Do these people actually think that they are being helpful or do they at least realize deep down that all they are doing is posing? Either put the two seconds of work into being actually helpful or spare the list from your laziness. It suggests one or more of the following: sloppy work, disrespect, ambivalence, naivete for thinking that sending that kind of a note is actually going to accrue you anything positive from other list members.

Given the number of pet peeves we likely all have, I recommend commenting on this post if you have a mailing-list related pet peeve. Others are likely worth a post onto themselves.

I've had three faculty advisors (so far) in my never-ending-journey towards a PhD, and I have developed romantic/obsessive/crushlike feelings toward each of them. I haven't acted on those feelings or anything, and in all cases I'm sure they were unrequited.
The weird thing is that only in the case of advisor #2 was the person what you would call "my type". But #2 was way too old for me, and married.
Advisor #1 was someone I would not be physically attracted to under normal circumstances, being at least 5 inches shorter than me and weighing at least 50 lbs less than me. Also married.
Advisor #3 - the current officeholder - is even shorter than #2, and the wrong gender and yet I've still developed crushy feelings and even some sexual attraction.

When the admiration and intellectual respect I have for my advisors is combined with the power and approval dynamics of advisor/advisee relationships, I get the same butterflies in the stomach, blushing, wanting-to-please and fixations that come with romantic crushes. It's like some wires get crossed in my brain, and little things like gender preferences and heterosexuality are no longer relevant in the face of intelligence, a long CV, and the powers to provide me with funding and approve my dissertation proposal.

I haven't told any of my friends about this because they know the advisors in question, and would still be laughing at me to this day.

Thank god for academicsecrets.

If we are going to do this up proper, don't you think? I tried to think of one, but the best I could do was "We could tell you, but then we'd have to flunk you."

We could probably also do better in the links than just the Wikipedia entry for Academic and Secrets. I don't remember whose idea that was anyway. (It was Plaid's!) In any case, I'm not sure what would be links suitable to our theme.